


You Better Bow Your Head

by NorthwesternInsanity



Category: Deep Purple, Music RPF
Genre: Angst, Drama, Gen, Hard talks, Heavy Angst, Matter of Life and Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-11
Updated: 2018-10-11
Packaged: 2019-07-29 07:31:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16259546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NorthwesternInsanity/pseuds/NorthwesternInsanity
Summary: This particular night, there was no silver lining; no victory to stand over all the changes they'd seen since it all began with Gillan and Glover leaving. This night, there was no hiding away from where they stood, and no safety on the trigger. The bullet had been released, and they sat helplessly in the line of its ricochet.





	You Better Bow Your Head

The carnage was spread across half the otherwise empty hotel bar after three o'clock in the morning. 

Five band mates, post-evening performance; physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted, and falling headfirst down the hill of trying to get wasted on top of it all.

Jon Lord tried to tell himself that they had only played one too many a consecutive night. It would have been a believable conclusion, if it weren't for the knowledge deep down he'd tried for so long to deny that there was more to it. What they'd all tried to deny.

His back ached from pushing over the organ, throwing his entire body into force of the driving, rhythmic chords. His hands were sore from spreading across the keys of larger triads with the octave completed on either end -four notes down in one hand. Sometimes stretched to an augmented or diminished octave chord, spreading beyond the width of the eight-note span into positions that some people physically could not achieve -whether from lack of flexibility in the hand joints, or simply not having fingers long enough. It was particularly sharp in his right hand, which bounced from crawling spread-eagle over the chords to running frantically about trills and arpeggios, broken note sequences and riffs; the guitar parts that were layered in the studio and impossible to play live without replicating one line on the organ. His right hand's fingers ached with each grip on his glass, and his palms twinged with the pressure against the bruised surface from slapping down hard on the Hammond to make slides across the keys.

These pains were nothing new to Jon. They had been horrific in his younger days when he still had to learn half the things he now did every night without a second thought, and before he'd become accustomed to such movements. The aches were what sustained him when he ran on his own in the sixties with hardly anything he could claim belonging to his name, coming from the performances that kept him treading water. The aches had faded into a feeling of triumph. Deep Purple was a band at war in an aggressive industry, and they were winning in it.

Tonight, the feeling of triumph was absent, leaving only the aches for Jon to feel. He'd pushed his drink away half-consumed, settling to watch his exhausted bandmates than drink to celebrate a night that didn't feel worth celebrating.

Ian Paice sat at the end of the bar beside the radio broadcasting the global football scores. His glass was empty, and rather than requesting another drink or handing it over to be taken for cleaning as he usually would, he left it beside himself and lay slumped over the countertop, resting his cheek on his folded arms. The sideways pressure pushed his glasses askew on his nose, and though his eyes were open, the way he stared listlessly across the room above one lens and below the other, gaze not shifting from whatever it had fixed itself on, made Jon question if he was truly awake.

He had taken seemingly forever to find a position to stay in, and the stillness taking him over now was the opposite to the fidgeting before it. He'd struggled to decide where to prop his feet up -against the ledge under the bar counter, on the footrest of the stool, or if he should just let his feet hang freely so that the edge of the seat dug into the backs of his legs. Now Paicey sat with one foot on the counter ledge and one on the stool, and Jon still could not tell if he was satisfied, or if he'd given up trying and hunkered down where he was. He'd taken awhile to lay his arms still too, and had turned several times before deciding which side to rest on. 

The shrugging motion he'd pulled his shoulders through before leaning over told Jon that he had also been left with old aches and muscle spasms for the night. He too, had ended his celebration early.

As he often did, David sat near Glenn and Tommy, as close as he could get on the other side of Glenn. However, unlike most nights, he was not as eager to jump into the conversation whenever he saw the opportunity. He stayed unusually quiet for himself, and his first choices of drink led Jon to believe that he may have strained his voice beyond the normal discomfort he was used to after singing his lungs out for the night.

Rather than turning sideways in his seat toward Glenn, David sat facing straight ahead at the counter. He uneasily rested his fingertips on the edge of the surface, so that his wrists hung down and his elbows rested on his lap. Leaning forward slightly so that his shoulders hunched, and wearing a tragic expression that set his lips in a downward curve and his brow furrowed over wide eyes, he resembled a puppy that had been kicked out on the stoop, unknowing of what he'd done to deserve his current place. Every now and then, he cast a sidelong glance toward Glenn, and Jon could see his eyes well up for the moment after when he saw that Glenn wasn't giving the slightest glance toward him. He was well past tipsy, and it wouldn't take much more drink before his displeasure of being cast to the side would have greater control over his emotions.

Tommy sat with Glenn, right arm draped over who was undeniably his best friend on the entire planet. When he turned enough that Jon could see his face, as turning toward Glenn left him mostly obscured from sight, he wore a gentle, affectionate smile on his face as usual. Every now and then, he let out a low and sweet laugh at something he or Glenn found funny in their exchange. But his eyelids were heavy, his eyes were glazed over, and his smile was held weak. The corners of his mouth twitched as tiredness nagged every voluntary muscle in his body to relax and let him succumb to it and rest. He leaned his chest into the counter rather than sitting upright, and his left arm hung limply at his side.

There were times that fatigue -whether from jet lag, drugs, a hard night onstage both physically and mentally, or simply life itself -could bring some residual effects back from the nerve injury. There was never complete numbness or paralysis as before the heat therapy had worked its magic one night too late to save the performance in Japan. However, there was no mistaking when an hour or so offstage, Tommy would deliberately avoid using his left arm to do any lifting of his bags. His motions with his left hand were sluggish and took more effort than they should have.

Getting his belongings up to the room he was sharing with Glenn for the night had not been easy for him tonight, and Jon knew it when he saw it. But with some awful heckling from the stands tonight, suggesting straight to Tommy's face that he was incompetent even when he had played without a hitch this night, Jon hadn't had it in himself to offer Tommy help. He didn't want it to come across the wrong way and only further serve to make Tommy feel that he couldn't do anything right no matter how hard he tried.

The low murmurs he heard from Paicey, cursing 'certain fans' who could 'hardly be called that with their show of respect' told Jon that he too wanted to do anything to fix it, and that he hung back for the same reason.

Glenn had progressed from overly-energetic and buzzing with high when they'd arrived to increasingly lethargic. He was well into a drunken stupor, cackling lowly at Tommy's funnier remarks and fully leaned over the table on his arms. His feet no longer propped against the stool footrest as they had, but hung at the sides, swinging freely, threatening to slide each time Glenn leaned too far to one side.

Jon loved Glenn. He was one of the most lovely friends to have around, with his wit that could make anyone laugh, his affection for everyone around him, and his charm of having no apologies to be who he was regardless of whether it made him stick out like a sore thumb in some places. It was enough in the start to accept that Glenn had his demons. He used drugs, and he didn't always have control of it. That was forgivable when he was still in control and performing well onstage every night, and not losing control elsewhere to the point of putting himself and others in danger. In hindsight, Glenn getting on the roof and going on a tirade might have been funny if it was a one-off incident. But more and more often, things of the type were happening, and it made Jon miss the sweet and charismatic Glenn that was more often losing to the violent one, and the one who was terrified of everything.

Some nights that were in between the extremes, he wondered how much of his friend Glenn was there, and how much of him was possessed by the demon of a white powder, mixed with other things that might not have done so much damage -no more than what they all experienced -on their own, but were disastrous in combination.

The combination they'd all had at least one component of since coming down for the night. And just another reason why Jon had lost his sense of triumph where he sat.

He wasn't sure how long he'd sat there, silently drifting in his thoughts and watching, when Glenn finally leaned too far and slid from his stool. One leg slid off and took the rest of him into the fall before he could react. Jon wasn't even sure if it had entirely registered yet when Glenn lay sprawled on the floor, unmoving, with his eyes closed.

The next thing he was aware of, Tommy was down on the floor next to Glenn and trying to help pull him up to a sitting position so that they could wake him up and get him someplace safer to sleep it off than the middle of the path. But he wasn't strong enough to pull Glenn up with one arm, and his other arm was too weak to get a proper grip on Glenn's other hand so that he could use both. Attempting to push his bad arm underneath Glenn's back and pull him up that way -still keeping his good hand locked around Glenn's opposing side hand, Tommy leaned over Glenn and strained to sit up from his position without losing his hold.

The same result occurred with the inability to keep his arm around Glenn tightly enough to pull him up. Glenn slid down the slope of Tommy's slack arm when he managed to get him up a mere five inches, and between intoxication, crashing off his high, and the exhaustion of the rough night it had been onstage for him, Tommy collapsed forward on him. Panting, he rested his chin on Glenn's chest and gave his whole body a moment's rest in an attempt to summon the strength he needed.

"Come on, Glenn; wake up," Tommy pleaded. "I can get you up, but you have to help me out. You're stronger than me."

Looking stricken and taking a moment to surreptitiously drag his hands over his eyes before reacting, David scraped back his stool and stood up from it. He nudged Tommy back up to a sitting position and checked that the guitarist had not strained himself before he tried desperately to help out too. 

Just as he and Tommy nearly had him sitting up, Glenn woke up with no sense of where he was. As soon as he managed to get unsteadily to his feet with help from David, turning around with a look of panic and irrational paranoia in his eyes as he tried to orient himself, Tommy took an uncoordinated step backward and lay over on the floor. That left David scrambling to decide whether to take Glenn to his room before he either created a scene or passed out again, or check on Tommy first to see that he was alright to be on his own -with the risk that he'd have to help Glenn up again without Tommy's help. Neither were in any shape to get all the way down the hall to their room independently, and David had no chance of physically getting them both there in the same trip.

Jon's features were also stricken as he watched the sickening scene unfold, and he too scraped back his stool. However, his intent was different from David's. He'd had enough. If the party wasn't over when he'd first felt it was, it definitely was now.

"Perhaps I'm best off to bed for the night," he murmured, folding his coat over his arm and making his way out.

Without a word, Paicey, who had long since tuned out the radio and lost all interest and enjoyment of the football scores, slid off his stool and sneaked out behind Jon, leaving poor David to the mercy of Glenn and Tommy's conundrum.

He knew why Jon was leaving. He'd had enough too.

There had been plenty of eerie quiet walks through houses and hotels that Jon and Paicey had experienced in their time in Deep Purple -ones they'd taken on their own, and ones they'd taken together, either by coincidence, or by choice in the places where nobody felt comfortable walking even to the toilet alone. Plenty of those walks had occurred on bad nights too, be it somebody sick, Ritchie having a fit, or the Jakarta incident in which they'd all walked with guards backstage through tears and silent pleading to go home alive.

Jon was quickly deciding that this was the worst he'd felt since then. And even though nobody had died tonight, nobody had been arrested under false accusations, and nobody had forced them to go onstage by threat, he was beginning to feel the same desperation to just get out of here and go home.

A quick glance behind him as he unlocked the door to the hotel room told him he might not be alone in feeling that way. From another set of equally troubling thoughts that led to the same endpoint, indeed, he wasn't.

"If you'd like to take turns, I'll change now, and you can get the loo," Paicey offered, closing the door to the hallway behind them.

"As you wish." Jon got his hygiene kit from his suitcase and disappeared into the loo to get ready for bed, leaving Paicey to change clothes in privacy.

Privacy. That was a rare commodity these days, even with the resources to room everybody separately in hotels with enough vacancies. The thought of it was just another sign of the rising tensions. With as much time sharing dressing rooms and being on long tours together, neither often gave a thought to changing in front of one another.

It wasn't a gesture of accommodation. It was an attempt at finding a distraction.

Perhaps another sign was Jon finding himself so lost in the thoughts he'd carried back to the room that he completely lost focus on where he was, and the purpose of being there. When he snapped out of it, he realized to his dismay that he'd been sitting on the edge of the bathtub for the better part of ten minutes with his toothbrush hanging through his lips. He'd finished brushing nearly as soon as he'd sat down and proceeded to sit still and staring off into space, lost in thought, cheeks bulging to capacity with foam and saliva. Some of which was sneaking down the handle to slip his hand up. His sore finger joints were screaming for release from the tight grip he'd taken to compensate for the slippery touch.

That did it. He needed to call home. Any sort of distraction to clear his mind of what was going on here.

Sighing through his nose, he stood up and rinsed out, got cleaned up in the sink, and finished as quickly as he could, hoping that Paicey hadn't been expecting him to be fast and kept waiting by his drift into space.

When he emerged, Paicey was already changed and sitting on the sofa, elbows on his knees with either intense thought, or forced concentration. Every few seconds he scribbled something in his notebook that was splayed open on the coffee table. It wasn't in the typical organized manner for him. With a long enough look, Jon could see he was grasping for his focus and barely holding on. Nothing could have been further from normal for him.

"Sorry about how long-"

"It's fine; I'm not with it either." Paicey flipped the notebook shut and got up. "I give up for tonight."

Jon opened the door and leaned in the doorframe, trying not to dwell on how unusual it was for Paicey to outright up and quit a task he'd started without a second thought too.

"I'll be back. I called home before we went on, but I'd like to again."

"That's fine; do what suits you." Paicey closed the bathroom door behind himself, and Jon closed the room door to find himself alone in the hallway.

It was beyond him how it was it that they were as together as a family within the band as they'd been from the beginning -spending more time with each other and enjoying it than ever -yet in the split moment the door closed behind him, he realized that he felt more isolated and alone than he had since the beginning of the band.

_This band is dying... Right before my very eyes._

It was there around him, but it was fading. Falling. Self-destructing. Crashing and burning. However he could put it, it had reached the point where he couldn't ignore it and focus on what was going well, try as he might. Because that was fading. Fading just like the sense of triumph that should have been distracting him from the aches through his hands...

Too much to think of by himself. _Too much._ Jon hurried around the corner to the public phones in the hall outside of the laundry facility. At this hour of the night, their placement away from most of the rooms was safer. The band rooms were not grouped together, and he wasn't going to take a chance on how thick the walls were and risk waking someone up.

Jon dialed home and waited. It rang and rang, and nobody answered. After ten rings, he hung up and tried again through an operator, only to meet the same result.

He checked his watch. 4:00 AM here. It was mid-daytime back home. There was probably nobody at home to answer.

Feeling more trapped than ever, Jon walked back to the room. He only realized when he got to the door that he hadn't taken the key with him. 

After years of spending night after night in hotels where picking up a key on his way out was something of second nature -something he hardly gave any more thought to than breathing -and he had not only forgotten it, but not sensed that the cold metal form was missing from his hands in the entire time he'd been in the hall. His sore hands that should have easily told him whether he was holding a key or not.

_Telling, isn't it?_ He resorted to knocking on the door for Paicey to let him in, thinking of how fortunate he was, if for nothing else, to not be in a solitary room tonight.

The door opened with a pause, and Paicey looked out through a narrow gap to make sure it was him before opening it all the way. He looked confused as Jon walked in, until he turned back to the room where the key lay out on the nightstand in plain sight. A shadow fell across his face then; that knowing look mixed with dread, all telling Jon that he could see right through him.

Both spoke in unison:

_"We need to talk."_

"Tonight," Jon added, feeling as though he was suffocating, because as badly as he needed it -as they both did -he wanted to go to bed and forget it, and wish to wake up at home in the morning even though it was impossible to happen.

"Before we can back out of it, say that we're tired and put it off, let's just..."

Paicey didn't even complete the thought aloud, but he turned the desk chair to face the beds, forcing himself to the task, and Jon lowered himself to sit uneasily on the end of his bed. He knew better than to trust his legs to stay standing through the conversation that faced them. Putting his hands in his lap and tight against his body, he locked his fingers together and leaned forward with his shoulders pulled forward, guarding himself physically as much as he wished he could guard himself from the verbal battlefield they were walking into.

Knowing that he needed to have the conversation and actually wanting to were two entirely different things.

He wasn't sure if the latter ever could be the case.

"Do you care to start off?" Paicey wasn't even looking in his direction from across the room, deterred by the tension in the air.

"Heavens, no." Jon responded so quickly he almost felt the need to apologize for it. _Almost,_ but he didn't, knowing that Paicey was thinking the same thing.

"Well, neither do I, but somebody has to."

This time, Jon started like he was going to speak, but instead swallowed, hard-pressed to get the words out. He wasn't sure whether Paicey was having mercy on him or dragging him to war by continuing.

"I suppose I'll do it then. Give me a moment -how's the least morose way of putting it..."

"I don't think there is one," Jon murmured.

"This isn't exactly the best tour we've had," Paicey tried. "I suppose we've had worse. It still is more prolific than in the beginning in terms of turnout; as for the fans and people in the crowd present actually liking it, it depends on what type of fans we look at and what kind of a night we're having, and-"

He cut himself off. He already knew he was starting to speak in circles before Jon could stop him.

"It didn't start off feeling terrible," said Jon, "and we didn't feel like we did on the nights where Blackmore decided he just had enough of it, but we would have to change something for it to continue like this if we have onstage breakdowns and nights where fans are screaming for every reason aside from why we want them to."

"There are things that could be done, if we seriously wanted to chase down replacements again, or maybe if we were to slow down the schedule, to allow recovery time and compensate, since we can't..."

Jon didn't have it in him to force out the only answer they really could see working long-term. He didn't want to chase more replacements, and even if they could slow down the schedule, it wouldn't change the ultimate problem at hand with the drugs gone out of control. Sooner or later, having gap nights between performances wouldn't make much difference, if it made one at all.

Paicey left cover and fired the first verbal bullet.

"When does this end, Jon? When is this -all of it -enough? Or have we already had enough?"

Jon didn't reply. He started to, but the words died away just as before.

The question flew through the air in slow motion, and the air turned cold and stinging as it echoed and began to bounce off the walls, flying back to begin working at the shields they'd put up against what they'd already known downstairs, and could have seen sooner if they hadn't been so adamant to hide away from the battlefield and let things continue as they were.

This particular night, there was no silver lining; no victory to stand over all the changes they'd seen since it all began with Gillan and Glover leaving. This night, there was no hiding away from where they stood, and no safety on the trigger. The bullet had been released, and they sat helplessly in the line of its ricochet.

"It kills me to say it, but we can't keep doing this. It's probably something that needed to be said already. At some point, it's got to stop-"

"Wait there for just a minute, because I have my concerns if it doesn't, but Paicey, what do you think will happen if we keep on?"

"Best case scenario, or worst?"

Paicey suddenly didn't have it in him to look at Jon as he spoke, and he began folding in on himself, locking his hands together as Jon had and trying to duck back behind the shield of denial that he'd already compromised with the first question. It couldn't do much for him now.

Jon winced at his reaction, knowing he was feeling the same way as himself. Staying guarded as he had to start, he bowed his head and propped forward on the edge of the bed against the heels of his hands, no longer able to look either.

"I would think -my guess is either somebody eventually quits and starts a chain reaction until we're all gone, or we have to hang it up from exhaustion." Jon quietly exhaled after forcing it out, still staying on the defensive, but knowing he was about to throw himself in the line of fire as much as he hated it. 

"I know that what I think is asking for everything to stay as it is now and not get any worse, and that's asking a lot. So, what do you think realistically would happen?"

"That's not a bad guess." Paicey's tone was halfway between fear and relief -either expecting worse, or something that wasn't possible even under the best fate.

"Realistically, it could go over that way. We're not far from it, looking at how we're thinking now, and if one of us were to throw commitment to the tour out the window and start tonight, it might. If I'm going to be brutally honest, though, and it's not something pleasant to think-"

"Say it or don't say it." Jon's voice had an odd strain to it, a familiar one that neither he, nor Paicey wanted to acknowledge with the weak hope that it would go away or that they'd finish the conversation before anything came of it. "I can already tell we're going to go back and forth on the decision of where this ends more than once, no matter what. We already are. If you think it would decide this, then we need it and it might as well happen now so we don't have to rethink it, but if we can make a decision without it said and you don't wish to say it, then there's no point in-"

"No, it needs to be said. Even if we could choose what to do without it. Because even if we do know it, we're still going to question whatever decision we make for some time -or at least I will -and we can't deny where we are any longer. We need to justify this-"

Paicey trailed off and shook his head, muttering darkly and inaudibly at why it couldn't be more simple to just cut to the chase and get it over with when breaking bad news. The more uncomfortable, the harder it was to say simply without it striking to hard, the more both he and Jon were desperate to stall on it...

_Get it over with. Both of us know we're not going anywhere until one of us says it._

This time, it had to strike hard. There was no other way.

"We're going to lose one of us."

_Shots fired._

Jon didn't move from his hunched position, but there was a low wheeze as he exhaled. The sound that more often came from wind knocked out with an impact to the gut.

The same sensation was coming over Paicey, and he waited to feel the air return to his lungs -to make sure it wasn't going to turn into something more serious -before forcing himself to carry on.

"I know that might sound like an exaggeration; I've thought it through and I've asked myself if I'm letting myself get carried away to seeing things worse than they are. But if things keep on this track and everything lines up to the worst, we're going to lose one of us. Tragically."

_Shots ricocheting off the walls._

"The five of us in this band -I don't care to think of who it will be, especially when we've already lost one of our crew, and that was more than enough-"

A soft noise crossed the room. One that Paicey had hoped not to hear, but could have guessed he would have.

He froze mid-sentence, looked across, and every shield of optimistic denial he and Jon still had left between them all but shattered. Not another doubt as to what the situation had escalated to or where it would go would come to him. At the same time, every word exposing it retreated to where it would take every nerve to get them back out.

He watched as Jon sat trembling on the edge of the bed, now with his face in his hands as he wept. Another gentle sob cut through, wracking his frame and sitting heavy in the air.

"-Jon? I'm sorry..."

Jon held up one hand and shook his head. He stayed bent over for what felt like an eternity of agonizing silence through the room, only broken by faint sniffling. Then he stood up and went for the loo to freshen up, something that even he knew was useless to do when what they needed to deal with had barely been scratched.

It was several minutes more of silence after he emerged and sank back down on the bed in a guarded position with a heavy sigh, before Paicey decided he had fully collected himself and that it was safe to speak again. His voice was stark quiet across the hotel room.

"I'm sorry."

"It's not your fault," said Jon shakily. "It had to be said. We knew it and you said it; I asked it of you and you couldn't have sugarcoated that. If I still had it in me to see only the good nights and pretend we didn't have a problem, I would too. Because it's frightening to say it."

"It's why I haven't said it sooner either." Slowly, Paicey got up from the chair and sat down on the bed next to Jon. The hard barrier had broken and there was no abandoning the conversation now. They were both vulnerable with no shields left to cling to for support -only each other.

Being past the hardest part wouldn't make it any easier either. Not with the words still hurtling between the walls of the room.

"When everyone's with it, it's fantastic, but when they're not -this is just crap. And when certain fans act like they do, I don't know if it's better or worse whether we're all with it or not."

"Times like these where you wish Gillan would barge in acting like a fool. Doing something completely ridiculous. You know, like wearing a sock on his bollocks, his knickers on his head, and nothing else," Jon murmured as he searched for something to lighten the air; to knock some of the flying lead out of it. "Just when it got to a point and he would try to see if the humor would make it better."

Paicey tried to laugh at the hysterical image that conjured up. Especially as images popped up in his mind of Ian Gillan and all the times he'd indeed taken his clothes off in unconventional places, or worn clothing in ways it wasn't purposed for. Not to forget the time he'd run around naked and screaming after a wakeup call via spider too. 

But the smile to start it turned into a grimace halfway in, and trying to force the laugh through gave him the same sensation of choking on air he got as a child fighting tuberculosis.

"I miss Ian," he admitted. "Roger too -both of them. I don't mean bad of the others with that -Glenn and David were great coming in and still are, and Tommy's as kind as they come-"

"I know what you're saying," Jon agreed. "Loving who we have now but still missing what we had."

"The hardest thing is I think if we'd just tried something -I know Gillan had to leave because he'd even put in notice asking for it at the end of the tour with the way things were going. Still, I think if we'd tried for Roger -I don't know; maybe we wouldn't be here having this conversation. What happened hurt him, but I was afraid that if we did try and succeeded, Ritchie would give him the hardest of times, and we couldn't live with that-"

"Alright, that is not something we have to weigh out here. Stop it." Jon's increasingly thickened tone confirmed he was crying again, and for once it was difficult rather than relieving to know that he wasn't the only one who had ever questioned it and felt the underlying guilt. "Stop it right now. We can't know how it would have ended, nor do we need to be thinking of where that could have gone badly."

With Jon's warning, Paicey backed off at once. He hoped he didn't look as stricken as he felt inside as he searched for some minor distraction. Finding a loose thread in the bedspread, he took it between his fingers and tried to split the strand in two with his nails rather than going for the more destructive option of pulling it.

"No, I don't often talk about it because I know we can't change it now. We can't have that. Really, we ought to stop this entirely for the night. You're very tired."

Jon was too tired to even raise his eyebrows in surprise.

"I thought I'd done a better job hiding that than I suppose I have," he sighed. "Just like this mess we've got."

"Which is why we have to do this and figure this out. We can't have this either. Not for long without doing something."

"So what do you think we should do then?" Jon asked, watching Paicey leave crescent imprints on the pads of his fingertips from digging at the thread. "I'm for holding out until the end of the tour if we can, or at least this leg of it that's already been booked and we can't back out now. But how should we go about breaking it to the others if we're even to do that?"

"That's the trouble I was getting at. If we were to go by a business standpoint alone as to what would be best if we ever wanted to recover it again in the future, we'd be better to stop it where we are; do no more damage, and just end it tonight -deal with unhappy fans and cancellations, and not give a damn how pissy management is going to get with us. By the same standpoint only considering the now, we keep going and we drag this tour out as long as we can until it implodes. But taking into account all of us; Jon -we let a lot of things go too far before we got to this point, and now the way we're going, one of us is going to get hurt."

"The others aren't going to be happy if we just drop it over them and end it tonight -even if we told them it's over at the end of this tour, there's going to be upset." Jon winced, thinking of how Glenn might react even violently depending on how stoned he would be upon receiving the news. "How do we even go about telling-?"

"I don't know, Jon -either of those ways are going to devastate the lot of us. And we already know it's going to implode. Every time we've kept going -change the lineup and have a fresh start -it gets our hopes up. Yet again, it still implodes. It happens every few years like there's this self-destruct timer. And..." 

He froze, dropping the now-frazzled thread and searching for something positive to say to take the cutting edge off his previous words. The possible negative outcomes jammed themselves in, leaving him at a loss.

Jon heaved a sigh. "Makes me wonder if we should have just ended it when Blackmore left -even if it would have satisfied him -just to save all of us from the pain it's going to cause now when we've got to be the ones to pull it apart -for us, and to inflict that on David and Glenn. Because we know that David is going to be devastated to see it all blow up again-"

Paicey snapped his head up to look at Jon, and the look that crossed his face was so pathetic that Jon stopped mid-sentence and pulled him into his arms.

"It just breaks my heart!"

"I know it does. It breaks my heart too." Jon's tone turned crestfallen again as he helplessly stroked his thumb down the ridge of Paicey's spine to comfort him. It only provoked him to pull back.

"Don't fuss, _please._ " Paicey pulled away with as much semblance of calm as he had left, heaving a sigh and blinking back unshed tears. "I'm alright."

"This isn't alright, and you're not alright now."

"You don't need to be upset just because I've gotten myself upset. Give me a moment. I'll be fine."

By the time his protest was out, Paicey had somewhat caught his slipping composure, but the opposite was the case for Jon, who was well past being embarrassed or hiding it. He hardly had the energy left to care if he was pathetic when the state they were all in was just as bad.

"I was already upset. If we're trying to be honest about what's going on here and we're both upset, so be it -we're upset! There's no more pretending that this is fine. Now where even were we? -we're so exhausted we can't even stay on one train of thought and pretending it's fine. Paicey, how are we ending this, if this tour is the end? You're the one who works all that with management; if either of us know what's best..."

"Saying it is going to make it sound easier than it will be -I say we play out what we have scheduled, because we know it's going to cause a meltdown if we cancel dates we have booked. I'm sure you can agree with me that we're not booking another night after that."

The thought was enough to make Jon want to choke and gag. He shook his head, feeling too nauseated to even make a remark of it.

"Maybe we could cancel any we have after the break in the tour, because those are far enough out and there are only a few -we'd have to decide what would be easier, and I'm not ready to figure that out tonight.

"If there's a night before then where things get too far out of hand, we could just end it then too," Jon decided. "I think we'd know. I don't want to guess on what would be a sign; I think we'd just know. And we have to decide right now that when we get that gut feeling, we can't ignore it no matter how much we want to."

"I don't think we'll want to."

"Probably not." Jon winced as the next thought crossed his mind. "How are we to tell the others -regardless of which way? Do we sit everyone down; break it at the end of the last performance, or just go home and not say anything and not ever pick it back up?"

"I don't want to not be honest with them, Jon." Paicey rubbed on his sinuses above his eyes. "It would be easier for us to not tell them -no worries as to how Glenn would take it-"

"But whether we do or not, they'll still find out eventually," Jon finished.

"And I don't know if that will be easier or harder for them -maybe we'd be protecting them up front by not saying it, but they'd have to face it. But telling them as it's happening, we won't be protecting them from each other, and if it ends with a fight-"

Tears stung at Jon's eyes, and he pushed the thought away. No need to imagine that happening now and to live through it twice.

"I don't think we'd have to worry about them fighting each other -they'd be more likely to fight us if they don't agree on ending it. I can't imagine they see it going on this way forever. I don't know with the state of some of us though -do you think they see it going on this way still?"

"Jon, you're asking me something I don't know how to ask; I don't know what this all looks like through whatever it is they're on. If any of them have thought to end it, it's David, because he's the one looking like he doesn't know what to do with himself anywhere but onstage, and sometimes he still doesn't seem to know there. I don't like thinking of whether to tell them or not and how they're going to take it, because there's going to be turmoil regardless of how it's done. Neither of us want that, and it's why we've kept going even when we thought otherwise -many times now, with Gillan, with Ritchie... But if you want what I think personally, I can't see letting this go on -seeing Glenn and Tommy self-destruct; watching and knowing that you and David are being _t-tormented_ by it every night, and..."

Paicey's voice cracked on 'tormented', he trailed off, and this time he was shedding tears.

Jon turned himself sideways on the edge of the bed so that they faced each other directly, and he placed his hands firmly on his shoulders.

"Ian," he murmured, emphasizing how serious he was by forgoing his nickname, "you say that like it doesn't matter how much you're being tormented by this too."

_"Don't._ Please." Paicey hiccuped; his shoulders hitched slightly as he slid his fingers under his glasses and swiped the tears away as a distraction from what Jon knew by now wasn't so much embarrassment, but fear becoming sick -of starting an asthma attack he'd not dealt with in so long and needing help when everyone else in the band was already desperate enough for it.

"We're all being tormented in some way or form. I know half the trouble for Tommy is just how cruel these 'fans' are to him. Tell him all you want to ignore it or whatever, but _life's too short_ to hear the kind of words he hears every night. And Glenn -I don't know how aware he is of his state..."

Jon sighed, turning back over the edge of the bed when he saw the rising panic slide back under control. "He's not, and it absolutely terrifies David."

"I get the sense that David blames himself sometimes," Paicey murmured darkly, looking twice as exhausted as though his remaining energy had drained right from his eyes.

"What makes you say that rather than him blaming the rest of us?"

"Don't think he doesn't," Paicey insisted. "He pretends to not blame us for putting him in this place before he was ready, but I'm sure he does, and he's got reason to. But he still acts like he thinks he could have stopped it if he'd tried when he's all but -I can't tell you; he's pulled a lot of weight and it's not fair for him either."

"We're dealing with this; it's not much different," Jon insisted. "Life's too short for _this_ too."

"I've dealt with worse."

"So have I, but that doesn't mean we have to put up with it when we can stop it." Jon shook his head. "Even if that might not be easy either. We knew it was bad, but I don't think either of us really looked at the entire extent until now."

"No, we knew without looking," Paicey insisted with another sniff that was intended to be scornful, but lost all effect from wetness. "We wouldn't be this upset or afraid to do it if we didn't. We just wanted to pretend we didn't know. Now we can look at how much time we've wasted doing it."

"Perhaps hanging this up -right where we said at the end -is the best thing to do."

"Then fucking hang it up."

Jon grabbed a handkerchief off the nightstand and brought it over, but it was of little help, as Paicey had already scrubbed the end of his sleeve over his eyes so that his cheeks flushed hot, and he was coughing from sniffling his sinuses into submission.

"Remind me why must you be so stubborn?" Jon chided, putting it back.

"Every one of us here is stubborn over something if you think about it enough. With what we've been through, we wouldn't still be here now if we weren't."

Jon sighed. "We're both knackered, and that's hardly helping us. We should try to get some sleep while we still can. I know I should after that, though I'm probably just going to think."

"I already _know_ I'm going to think."

The next words were a loss to both as they resumed their uncomfortable positions -bowed heads, looking down and away from the hard reality that cornered them.

Finally, Jon heaved another hard sigh, and swore to himself that it wouldn't have mattered if he'd sighed a hundred times with the feeling in his chest -it wouldn't give him any relief tonight. Possibly, it wouldn't until they reached the last scheduled night, or whatever bad night before it that would be impossible to deny as the end.

"Bloody hell, if that wasn't one of the hardest conversations I've ever had to have."

Paicey sighed too as he concluded his coughing jag with one final, extra forceful cough.

"Let's see how few more we can manage to get to the end with."

"As few as possible is all I ask for." Jon looked to where they sat next to each other, now all but glued side-to-side and rigid with the fear of what they'd turned loose in the room.

You can stay here if you need to," he offered. "Or really, if you just want to."

In a matter of seconds, darkness overtook the room, and through the setting numbness, the two lay beside each other in the dark, barely able to sense their contact despite having their sides pressed together as they had been sitting. Paicey couldn't bring himself to comment on the irony of how it was possible to feel so far apart and so close at the same time. There was no need anyway; Jon felt the same, and he was sure the tension in his body said it all.

The vulnerable position told them both everything they needed to know as they lay in the dark, bleeding from raw wounds as the bullets that carried the painful truth continued to bounce off the walls of the rooms, echoing their every word back to them. The words that the others might never hear them say, yet surely some night would be caught by, waiting for the ricochet.


End file.
